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Children of history: A family journal

Posted August 19, 1993 at 9:08 AM

Greg Osborn

"Whenever I see these forms with race on them, I say, 'What the hell am I going to do? There's no box on here for me.'" -- Greg Osborn calls himself 'Creole.' (Kathy Anderson/The Times-Picayune archive)
(Kathy Anderson)

Greg Osborn remembers coming home from elementary school with a friend one day and running into his brother. Soon afterward, his friend turned to Osborn and asked him, "Are you adopted?"

Osborn has mahogany skin. His brother is much lighter. His friend had assumed Osborn and his brother were of different races and couldn't possibly be blood-related. It was an early, unforgettable lesson in race consciousness for Osborn. It would not be his last.

CHILDREN OF HISTORY

The third installment in the story of three people - Terrence Duvernay, Jack Belsom and Greg Osborn - whose family histories are woven into the fabric of New Orleans. Their common heritage goes beyond mere geography, for all three can look through their family trees and find common ancestry. But their lives, and those of their ancestors dating back to the 17th century, have been distinctly different.

Belsom is white. Duvernay is balck. Osborn calls himself Creole.

Those recial definitions, created and enforced by white people long ago, have a startling resilience that has exerted power throughout their lives. They are children of American history, and to know them is to begin to understand the impact of race in New Orleans.

Osborn, 27, considers himself Creole. To him, that means he has ancestors from many places. But in America, what has always seemed important to people is how much African ancestry Osborn had. No one much cared about his Portuguese, French, Indian or European heritage. What counted was the ancestry that made his skin dark, that made a childhood friend think he was adopted.

Despite its firm grip on the American psyche, the idea of race is a whimsical and shifting thing, invented and reinvented to fit different situations and different times.

The Germans considered the Japanese to be a different race - until World War II. Then they declared the Japanese, enemies of their enemies, white after all. The U.S. Census Bureau in 1930 counted Hindus - members of a religious faith - as a race, along with Mexicans. Today, black people in American culture are loosely defined as people with African ancestry. Yet Egyptian-Americans whose ancestors came from the African continent, are considered white by the census.

People whose appearance makes them racially ambiguous know this more than most. They live each day being categorized and labeled different things by different people.

Osborn is one of them. He has lived most of his life on this shaky fault line between white and black, a divide created by racism. Always trying to negotiate one side of himself against the other, Osborn for a long time didn't mention to anyone his African ancestry. He knew that it was that ancestry that would define him as an inferior person in the eyes of many white people. So he ran from it.

"I would always call myself Portuguese, Indian, English," Osborn recalls of growing up. "Sometimes, I would put black on the end. Mostly, I would leave it out entirely."

Osborn did not have to go very far to receive signals that African ancestry was a bad thing in America. Usually, the kitchen table was far enough. One of five children, he had the darkest skin of the siblings.

"I always had curly hair, and my older brothers would tease me about it," Osborn said. "They'd say I wasn't really a member of the family, that my folks must have found me somewhere."

Osborn's grandmother, who was one of five children herself, had such light skin that she insisted on being referred to as white, while her siblings considered themselves black.

"She tries to pretend she has no African blood at all," he said.

Osborn's grandfather had African and Portuguese ancestry, and spoke Portuguese, the language of the Cape Verde Islands off the western coast of Africa. He did not consider himself black.

One time, Osborn said, his grandfather asked his mother, "Where did he (Osborn) get that hair?" and he recalls her firing back, "From your mother." It wounded Osborn's grandfather, as designed, because it reminded him that he was hiding something.

Osborn knows the feeling well.

Growing up in Los Angeles (his parents moved there from New Orleans), Osborn insisted on being called Creole. When he was admitted into a prestigious prep school on the East Coast, he tried to fit in by acting like those around him - almost all of whom were white.

"I was just like any other kid, wanting to fit in," Osborn said. "I wanted to be a member of the dominant group. But I also wanted to be a minority. I was straddling the fence, trying not to be put in the black category.

"I guess it was in the 12th grade that I looked around me and realized, 'I'm not like everyone else. I'm different.' I realize now I was paying a high personal price for being part of the dominant group, by giving up a part of myself."

Osborn remembers vividly that after a Northeastern winter, he came home for the holidays with his skin several shades paler, and his mother exclaimed, "My baby's back. And look how white he is!"

"She didn't know how right she was," he said. "I had become white on the inside, too."

It was at college application time that Osborn really took firm grasp of the fence he was sitting on. The experience was a fascinating exercise in the many races he could become.

On the part of the college application that asks for race, he wrote French and Portuguese Creole.

It was in his first year at Stanford University that Osborn began to identify more and more with African-American students, and they became his social circle. But he could not escape his fence-straddling past. At some social functions, a former high school classmate would say with mock puzzlement, "Hmm, Ozzie never used to be black in high school."

Those constant conflicts finally led Osborn into a search for his past. He set out to find his earliest black ancestor. Since African ancestry was defining how he viewed himself, and how others seemed to see him, he wanted to put a name and a face to the phenomenon.

He found her in the 1880 census records for Bienville Parish. Her name was either Clarinda Holmes or Clarinda Hunter - the records are ambiguous - and she was an enslaved descendant of Africans. She had at least six children by a white slave owner, who was married to a white woman, with whom he had six children as well.

"I was very happy to find her," Osborn said. "She was the first one I found who was all something. She's like an aboriginal person to me."

Osborn moved back to New Orleans after graduating from college. Since then, he has found ancestors who were slave owners and slaves, Africans and Europeans, and even a member of the Bambara tribe in the African empire of Mali. And he has started embracing his African roots.

But that doesn't mean he considers himself black.

"I wanted to reach the point where I could acknowledge the part of me that was African, and still acknowledge the parts of me that are something else," he said.

One thing Osborn does not want to be is white.

"When I think of white, I don't think of it as something you would want to be," Osborn said. "White in this society means having no black ancestry. It's not the way I was raised."

Most of his life, Osborn has embraced parts of whiteness or blackness as needed to gain his advantage.

Because America remains a place dominated by white people, fence-straddling is a constant temptation. But giving in to that temptation is not something Osborn is comfortable with any longer. He says he's searching for a place he may not find - a place where he can live outside of the simple categorizations called race.

"Whenever I see these forms with race on them, I say, 'What the hell am I going to do? There's no box on here for me," Osborn said. "I've always heard people around me say, 'I'm Italian,' or 'I'm Japanese.' They all know what box they fit in. I couldn't fit into a box.

"Now I don't want to fit into a box, but I feel forced into one, or else you face teasing and harassment for the rest of your life. The pressure comes from both sides. White people are uncomfortable not being able to put someone into a group. Black people say you just think you're better than them.

"People don't like you to be 'other,' " Osborn said. "They want you to choose."